From Globalization to World Society : Neo-Institutional and Systems-Theoretical Perspectives

Since the 1970s, various sociological approaches have tried to understand and conceptualize "the global," yet few of them have systematically addressed the full spectrum of social relationships. Prominent exponents of the global approach - such as world systems analysis - instead have focused on particular domains such as politics or the economy. Under the label of "world society," however, some authors have suggested alternatives to the predominant equivocation of society and the nation-state. The contributions to this volume share that objective and take their point of departure from the two most ambitious projects of a theory of world society: world polity research and systems theory, mapping out the common ground and assessing their potential to inform empirical analyses of globalization.

Boris Holzer is Professor of Political Sociology at Bielefeld University.
 
Fatima Kastner is Lecturer at the Institute for Social Sciences, University of Hamburg and co-opted member of the Institute for World Society Studies, Bielefeld University.
 
Tobias Werron is Lecturer at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland.